The recent past has the advantage that it still preserves many of the spaces between which its scenes took place. In the worst case, when these places are lost, there are always the people who offer testimonies of what was. And if some of these testimonies, kept in the memory of the living inhabitants of that past, end up becoming a novel, all the better.
Avión Club was a place in Madrid, a benchmark for those eighties that were so busy in every way. A novel about those who met there ends up being a magnificent composition of place to understand the cultural revolution through that germ of improvised meetings beyond today's social networks.
Singular aspects about an art in full bloom in any of its manifestations, or social ones with the political background of a Spain that tried to equate in development and mentality with the rest of Europe and that sometimes collided with those reactionaries who still see a panorama in black and white.
The eighties and their peculiarities, the awakening of a lethargic society and the crossroads that were opening. All of this did not take place in a bar, but the characters who walked through the door of El Avión, brought that glow of thriving freedom.
A story told with the longing for evocation, but also connected with a sometimes harsh reality, with the aspects that always counterbalance all social progress. Characters who can finally live and love, who can begin to raise their voices to express their opinion and expose, who vehemently indulge in everything that makes them repudiate those gray days that are too soon.
Undoubtedly a passionate generational novel where the music plays live thanks to the emblematic César, a music that still seems to resonate, beyond the closure of this place back in 1994.
You can now buy the novel Airplane Club, the new book of Carlos Santos Gurriaran, here: